Trinity Audio Group and creative director Ronald Stewart have pushed the idea of a mobile music tablet since around 2005. I first saw what they were working on in the summer of 2006, as they readied a dedicated mobile DAW. But, at least from my vantage point, it’s really taken until now for some of the available hardware and software to evolve to the point that it could deliver on what they wanted to do. Products based first on Ultra-Mobile PC (UMPC) platforms and netbooks, while usable and more mobile than a laptop, required various tradeoffs. Linux software provided some significant power, but wasn’t yet an optimized experience for mobile use. I noted some of the promise, and shortcomings, in a review in late 2008 for Keyboard of Indamixx’s original Samsung hardware. (Keep in mind, this is all before anyone had heard of the iPad.)

Now, as they gear up for a 2011 release, Trinity have a new play to make a dedicated mobile music computer work. They’re offering a beta, starting now, for early adopters. I haven’t yet used the beta tablet, so I can only offer my personal perspective from my conversations with Indamixx.

There seems to be some confusion about what you get for the $699 price tag from an Indamixx 2 beta tablet. Engadget wonders why it tacks $200 on the price of the M1 Touch tablet on which it’s based. In fact, there’s more than $200 in bundled proprietary software, as well as customization of the free software. That makes Indamixx effectively a system integrator and the tablet a hardware/software bundle, rather than stock software. Synthtopia asks “does it matter,” as James Lewin argues for the greater “developer attention that the iPad has received.” That ignores the fact that what Indamixx represents – with one vendor’s customization work – is at its heart a Linux system. With compatibility with Windows VSTs, deep tools like energyXT, Ardour, Renoise, and LinuxDSP, and a host of free software like Pd and Csound, I’d say any Linux machine has an order of magnitude more music software developer hours behind it than iOS. That’s not to say it’s better or worse, but it is different: if you are musically productive in these more conventional tools, you may already have passed on the iPad.

The software bundle is the main source of value here, since the tablet you could buy separately. The beta includes various commercial, proprietary software, including file exchange support for Ardour, full copies of Renoise, energyXT, and superb plug-ins from LinuxDSP. There’s also software that, while free, could take a significant investment of time to set up, even for someone with some familiarity with Linux. That includes customization, tweaking, and configuration of the MeeGo Linux operating system, and packages for things like JACK setup. The beta also includes extras like access to a streaming server, accessories, and pre-installation of a multi-boot configuration. As Trinity has pushed before, one audio output option is HDMI, which provides multichannel outs without the need for a dedicated card (provided you have something to which you can connect HDMI on the other end).

I’m going to ignore the iPad versus Indamixx argument for now, tantilizing flame war bait as it may be. I think the software offerings are significantly different that people will have an easy time choosing. If you like the iOS apps, you’ll get an iPad. If you’re more productive in something like Ardour or Renoise, you won’t. If you want single-app experiences, you’ll go iPad. If you like interconnecting apps or using plug-ins, you won’t.

Instead, I think the question for the Indamixx 2 is how competitive other tablets may be. The “not-iPad” category now is small, but it may not remain so. Indamixx is betting big on MeeGo, but that Linux distro is relatively new and untested. The M1 Touch hardware features a capacitive touch input like the iPad, but I haven’t yet been able to use it myself, so I’m not sure how it stacks up in terms of display quality, touch quality, and overall reliability and performance. Many tech pundits, myself included, incorrectly predicted a slew of new tablets in 2010 to rival Apple’s, at least in hardware quality. But 2011 does seem a likely timeframe for new hardware. That means the question is whether you want to bet on Indamixx to customize your experience, or assume that you’ll set up your own Windows or Linux tablet.

Diving in on a beta now isn’t for the feint of heart. Trinity offers only 6 months free support for the system, and warns against “airing out” criticism publicly, instead asking for bug reports. (Support after six months is available for a fee.) I don’t see an indication of NDA, but I would like to see indications of how responsive Trinity is to criticism – and this is a significant investment of cash for something that lacks long-term support.

To me, the big competition for Indamixx 2 is likely to be, ironically, Linux and Windows themselves. Will Trinity’s solution rival your own Linux or Windows install in May 2011? And is the better solution for tweaking Linux – which, even with the addition of these proprietary apps, still depends mainly on free and open source packages like JACK and MeeGo itself – be Indamixx as a private vendor, or the free software community? The latter is a relatively open forum for participation, whereas Indamixx, in its beta, warns “no crybabies” in its invitation to beta testers.

What we need to see is whether Trinity can build on its work in this field to deliver a truly finished, polished product, and whether it can build the kind of support relationship with users, developers, and the press to make its solution viable. Laptops have that ecosystem, and Apple – love them or hate them – does with iOS. Now, we’ll see how Indamixx stacks up to what’s likely to become a more crowded mobile space in 2011. In 2005, Trinity was relatively alone in calling for mobile music systems based on Linux. By the spring, when it comes to the tablet space, we may be off to the races. We’ll be able to judge the finished product, and its rivals, then.

Beta site:
http://indamixx.com/indamixx2-tablet.html

Ah, there’s nothing like bleeding-edge laptop performance. And to really convey to your audience that you’re indeed playing live, there’s nothing like glitches, dropouts, and crashing in the middle of a live set. It brings that homespun, digital authenticity to your performance, as you…

Okay, who am I kidding? You may be longing for a more stable, predictable, controllable mobile music rig. One way to get there is with the Linux operating system. The problem, however, is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, that setup can wind up being less stable, not more stable. Because Linux is about freedom and endless choice, you have the “freedom” to combine software in ways that … uh, doesn’t actually work.

I’m all for continuing to document ways of improving your Linux experience. At the same time, part of the free software business model – even according to the die-hards at the Free Software Foundation – is that custom configuration and distribution is a reasonable way to make money.

The best-available plug-and-play Linux music solution right now, hands down, is Indamixx. It’s got basically everything going for it:

• A highly-tweaked Transmission OS, as developed by 64 Studio
• Based on Ubuntu, so you can install recent Ubuntu packages for maximum software compatibility
• Carefully-tuned, custom real-time kernel for maximum audio performance
• Bundled with some great proprietary software, too, specifically ArdourXchange so you can import AAF files from your Pro Tools session – making your free software and proprietary software coexist peacefully
• LinuxDSP suite of mastering effects and plug-ins, specially tuned so they’ll work well even on Intel Atom-powered netbooks

The surprise: with the setup tuned in advance for you, Linux can be the friendliest out-of-box experience of any OS for music performance – seriously. Don’t get me wrong – it’s possible to get glitch-free performance out of Windows and Mac OS X, too. But Linux does offer a level of control and inter-application connectivity, as well as uniquely-strong performance on certain audio interfaces, that makes it a strong choice.

With tools like Pd and SuperCollider and the superb Renoise now on Linux, there’s no reason you can’t migrate your live performance rig to Linux – even if you choose to keep your production tools on another OS.

Normally priced at US$69, the Indamixx digital download is on sale for $49, and if you use sale code CDM, you get it for US$39. You have to purchase by January 19, and you have to use “CDM” as the code when you check out.

What you need to run it: Any PC netbook or laptop (and even UMPC/MID machines) should work. Note that Macs are not yet supported in this release; they’re trickier to dual-boot, but that support should come in the future. (If you know what you’re doing, it is possible to dual-boot the Mac, and honestly if you know your way around EFI and drivers I expect you could even use this distro.)

I’m not getting any money out of this deal, but I’m hoping for something far more valuable – it’d be great to have a little community of Linux users here on CDM so we can share tips with one another. As with, frankly, any OS, compatibility requires testing and tweaking. (That’s true even on the Mac, with a relatively limited hardware selection.)

Indamixx Digital Download

There’s also a USB key version, though it’s just as easy to buy or reuse a USB key of your own and use that.

I can certainly say, having tried various Fedora, SUSE, and Ubuntu configurations, I think the Indamixx/Transmission setup is the most painless and audio-friendly out there.

Open-source music and audio is finally delivering the goods: useful and unique tools that make sense even alongside commercial/proprietary software. And as a sign that the mainstream could get a taste of these tools soon, Intel is exhibiting at the massive Las Vegas CES consumer electronics show with Transmission, says Trinity Audio’s Ronald Stewart.

Transmission is Trinity Audio’s open source software bundle and live Linux distribution. It’s built for Trinity’s Linux-powered Trinity mobile studio device, which we’ll be seeing more of soon. At CES, it’s running at the Intel booth on the Samsung Q1 Ultra Ultra Mobile PC (UMPC). (The advantage of the Trinity over the UMPC for audio folks: XLR jacks, among other things.) But you can also run this free software on your PC — try the live CD link below. Haven’t tried it on Intel Mac yet, but that should work, too, theoretically.

Audacity [the open-source waveform editor]

Burn is a cd burn app

DJ is IDJ for live podcasting ( i love this with a mic)

Drum is Hydrogen [the simple but fun software drum machine]

Mixer is the Gnome ALSA mixer [for mixing virtual channels of audio on your system -- something not nearly as functional on Mac or Windows]

Mixxx 1.6 beta (rips with the touch screen grabbing the tracks and faders)

Record is Ardourino (Ardour is so awesome) [the open-source DAW]

Sequencer is Qtractor (another great app)

Synth is amsynth

Upload is an ftp app [so you can upload your tracks]

Zynaddsubfx is another great synth

For more description and links to the individual tools — an excellent selection of the creme de la creme on Linux — check the Transmission site. (warning: auto-plays audio!)

Transmission

But no need to have a UMPC or Trinity device to give this a spin. This live CD will do the trick. For Mac users, it even includes the native (non-Linux) Ardour for Mac, an excellent free and open source DAW for Mac users.

Trinity Live Master CD

Even as someone dedicated to proprietary software I really can’t live without (hello, Ableton!), I think there’s huge potential in using these applications for specific applications (like mobile devices), for collaboration, and file exchange. If we were really lucky, some of those major developers would start to build in support for, say, Ardour’s file format. But that’s the subject of another story.

Below: the Trinity mobile device getting celebrity treatment.

Linux for music is everywhere, from the power behind the Korg Oasys to new, more usable Linux desktop music software. CDM got a chance to talk to Chris Cannam of Fervent Software,
developers of the Linux-based Studio-to-Go. Chris tells us a bit more
about Studio-to-Go, as well as more generally the past, present, and
future of Linux music-making — as well as some ideas about how you
might actually use this stuff.

I've been running Studio to Go! on my Pentium M laptop, and after having
struggled with previous Linux builds to get a studio up and running, I
can say this is easy enough for a Linux virgin.
Boot from the CD, and not only is Linux pre-tuned for music and audio,
but you have access to a complete suite of pre-configured music and
audio tools and toys. With a flash drive and the CD, your studio is
always as close as an Intel PC (hence the 'to-go' part), but with one
command you can also install the studio to your hard drive. It coexists
with my Windows XP partition without reformatting.

Read on for the review . . .

Cost: GBP 49.99 (GBP 64.99 with 128M flash memory)
Compatibility: Intel PCs (though Fervent says they'd love to support Mac PPC — no plans yet)

Correction: Early-edition copy for this story listed cost
with 128M flash key as 69.99 pounds instead of 64.99. 64.99 is the
correct price — good deal on the drive! -PK

Who's the market for the product? Obviously, you need a PC to run it, but beyond that?

The ideal audience for Studio to Go! is an inquiring home musician
who's more interested in making music than fighting with technology and
who's thoughtful about how they spend their money.  Studio to Go!
is a very immediate way to get the heart of a complete composition
environment.

But with software that can do many different things, you can see it
fitting into other environments as well.  Say you have a studio
setup with a small network — Macs or PCs — with the odd PC around
that doesn't get much use.  Boot that with Studio to Go!, and
bing! a new range of synth possibilities that you can drive via MIDI,
and a score sketchpad, and an audio effects box — synths, drum
machines and plenty of effects plugins included, cheaper than a single
commercial VST or AU plugin and it drops straight in to your
network.  So there's a lot of potential for it as something to
just mess around with.

And there are plenty of interesting specific uses in the education
sector, but we think also a strong general informal appeal in
education.  In the UK, if you're a teenager studying music, you
get to sit around a PC running Sibelius in the classroom — but very
few people can afford that at home.  Studio to Go! can handle
notation and export MusicXML, and the type of software included — a
mixture of applications that can be connected up any way you choose –
encourages an exploratory, educational approach, so it's a good
complement.

Of course, Studio to Go! can't do everything — it's designed for
composition, arranging, recording, and mastering rather than, say,
DJing, live performance, or broadcast.

What's your background? How did this product come about?

The reason for this product is very simple: it's the system we wanted
ourselves.  We've been developing and using music software for
Linux for ten years now, and although the situation with traditional
Linux distributions has improved, most people still find it
frustratingly hard to put together a coherent Linux audio and music
environment. Studio to Go! is the best-designed environment for Linux
music software that we've ever used, and the easiest by an absolute
mile.

We do have experience with music software on other platforms as well.
Richard is the wannabe pop star with a Logic background, and I have a
classical training and familiarity with the usual score applications.
We think we can look at Studio to Go! from the perspective of people
who don't use Linux, and it's a great way to get a very well-integrated
set of music applications in a simple package at a good value price.

It seems like Linux audio has evolved a lot recently, from a
pretty primitive point to something that might stand next to Mac and
Windows soon, at least for basics. What are the biggest improvements
for you?

The JACK audio server has been the most critical development.  In
some ways it brings Linux well ahead of the situation on Windows. 
JACK is a little like ReWire — it allows you to send audio from one
application into another, entirely under your own control, as well as
having audio go to the soundcard.  Since the Linux MIDI drivers
allow the same thing of MIDI, that means you can basically connect
anything to anything else.

What makes JACK so powerful in practice is that it's a genuine
standard.  Essentially all Linux audio applications support it –
including all of the dozen or so serious applications included in
Studio to Go!.  That gives you a great deal of power, and it's
very easy to manage as well, with some simple graphical tools.

[Ed: Mac users, check out Jack OS X for a Jack implementation on Mac -- nothing like this available for Windows, unfortunately! -PK]

Where do you see Linux audio going in the future? Where would you like to see improvements?

Oh, there are many many possibilities.  So far most music software
development on Linux has been either quite academic, research-based or
leftfield work, or simply trying to match the sort of GUI applications
found on other more entrenched platforms.  Studio to Go!
concentrates on GUI applications, and it's a snapshot of where we are
at the moment, which is all pretty good stuff.  But we've got so
many ideas for other things to do and I think there's going to be an
exciting future as well.  For example, there's not much comparable
yet with the sort of chunky cheerful loop-based tools for live use or
experimentation that we've been seeing a lot of on Windows over the
last couple of years, and that's likely to be a big area –
applications that are 90% GUI and 10% plugging together the stuff that
we already have.  The new DSSI plugin API has a lot of potential
there as well.

Right, there's some good stuff out there, though nothing like
Ableton Live, etc. What kind of interest have you seen in doing audio
with Linux, given the dominance of Windows and Mac?

We've seen a lot of interest whenever we've shown people what software
there is for Linux.  I don't think many musicians will choose a
platform first and then look at what they can do with it — most are
fairly neutral about the platform, they just want the applications and
want them to work, and that's what we're providing here.  Of
course, some people are actively interested in the slightly anarchic
nature of the Linux development model, and others just think it's a
more ethical and equitable model.

Is downloading Studio-to-Go a possibility at some point? (Currently, it's only available as a mail-order CD.)

Downloadable purchases are a definite possibility, depending on
demand.  I'm rather old-fashioned myself, I rather like to get my
software in a box.

We don't have any plans to do a downloadable demo version.  That's
partly because there's no good way to control the time and scope of a
demo of a complete operating system, and we wouldn't want one anyway –
we wouldn't want to mix digital rights management with Linux. 
With most software, when you pay for the software you aren't actually
buying anything — you just get a limited license that could be revoked
tomorrow for all you probably know about it.  Studio to Go! isn't
like that.  There's no shrinkwrap license: we don't control the
way you use it: your copy is yours.

How will users update their system?

Studio to Go! is based on the Debian Sarge distribution, so if you
install it to the hard disk, you can then use Debian's apt-get to
update the base packages.  However, many of the audio-related
packages we include are configured differently from the Debian
packages, in order to provide the best performance in the Studio to Go!
environment, so you might not want to switch them to the Debian
versions.  We may will introduce a Fervent package repository so
as to handle these updates more smoothly in the future.

We will also have a cost-effective upgrade policy for people who want to update the Studio to Go! CD itself.

The big question about Linux is, will people want to pay for
things they can get free? What's the advantage of going to your CD
versus a DIY project?

The first thing is that we don't feel we compete with generic Linux
distributions at all, because Linux itself is not what we're selling.
If you want Linux, go to a Linux distributor.  If you want music
software with support, and if the fact that it happens to be a complete
Linux system as well warms your heart, then come to us.  If you
look at our product in that context — the context of the music
software market — it's obvious that it's remarkably good value.

That said, making a Linux-based music software environment does take a
lot of work.  People tend to underestimate that, both beforehand
and after the fact — they think it's going to be easy, and then they
forget how hard it was.  But it is hard.  On the Rosegarden
lists, we get more questions about installation problems than about
everything else put together.

We have users who are technically adept and have been tweaking their
Linux systems for years, and who still struggling with things in their
own systems that just work in Studio to Go!.  Setting up a Linux
2.6 kernel with low latency interrupt response like the one in Studio
to Go! is an example.  Getting support for Windows VST plugins –
no other Linux distribution includes that, and it's not easy to get it
working yourself.  In Studio to Go!, you just double-click on a
VST plugin and it loads, and then you can connect anything you want to
it using the JACK audio framework — or you just load it as a plugin in
Rosegarden, like the native plugins.  There's a lot of invisible
code behind that.  There are lots of other examples, because what
we've done is to select a set of applications that really work and
figure out the best ways to configure them and make sure they work
together.

Also, of course, it's only the existence of free Linux distributions
that makes it possible for us to provide this product and service at
anything like the price we do.  That price is proportionate to the
work Fervent do above and beyond our Linux base, not to the work
contained in the whole package.

What kind of system will people need for this? Is a PowerPC/Mac version possible in the future?

At the moment we're only dealing with the Intel-compatible PC
platform.  We recommend at least an 800MHz x86 PC with at least
256MB of memory — more is good, as running from a CD means you have a
virtual disk in RAM.

Windows NTFS compatibility has remained a stumbling block for
newcomers to Linux. What's the best strategy for storing files?
Obviously, there's the flash drive option — what if you want more?

You can save to Windows drives that use the FAT32 filesystem, which is
standard for Windows 95, 98 and Me and an option in Windows XP. 
It's very simple to do — the drives appear as icons on the Studio to
Go! desktop, and you can open them in the usual file manager by
double-clicking on them, with just the same result as browsing the
drive from Windows.  Sadly you can't save to Windows NTFS drives,
although you can load and run things from them.

Of course, if you have a spare partition or drive, you can always use
that for a Linux filesystem or an extra Windows FAT32 filesystem.

[Ed: Windows users should be aware Windows XP now formats drives as NTFS by default unless you specify FAT32. -PK]

Any chance you'll have an installer version, or are you focusing on the bootable CD?

You can install the bootable CD to hard disk and boot it from there. It coexists with Windows nicely.

The installed version behaves much the same as the CD — it's still a
dedicated single-user system.  That's not quite the same thing as
the usual Linux installer which makes a multi-user setup, but we wanted
to stick with the Studio to Go! environment even after installation.

What are some of the production possibilities with this software
setup? What kinds of music have you made it with, or seen others making
with it, and which apps did you use?

Speaking for ourselves personally, Richard inclines to a kind of
ambient folk music (he'll hate me for that) with recorded acoustic
guitars, vocals and samples plus synthesised backing, percussion and
textures.  That's a pretty classic fit for Rosegarden — a few
individually recorded tracks and some arranged audio, with MIDI and
synth and effects plugins.  Studio to Go! includes the Hydrogen
drum machine and some good synths that you can drive from Rosegarden,
so he's pretty much brought his working practices over from Logic with
very few changes.

My main interest is study and arrangements of classical music,
principally piano and chamber music, which is another natural fit with
Rosegarden and Lilypond.  I wouldn't call myself a composer.

The Ardour and JAMin recording and mastering applications found in
Studio to Go! have some strong advocates, such as Ron Parker at Mirror
Image Studios in Minneapolis who has made a number of excellent studio
and club jazz and rock recordings with them.  The JAMin mastering
application was largely designed to his requirements, and it's both
powerful and easy to use.  The simpler Audacity and Time Machine
audio recording applications are also useful as the instant equivalent
of your four-track tape deck, and I've heard quite a lot of live band
recordings made with them.

Thanks, Chris. We'll be watching for more in the future!